There was a time when much of the fashion industry hoped sustainability regulations would swoop in and help shape their strategies or define their goals, driving momentum in a way that would align with industry and government expectations. But now that regulations are here, brands and suppliers alike are drowning in it.
It came like a “tsunami”, says Morten Lehmann, co-founder and CEO of sustainability advisory firm Tailwind, and former chief sustainability officer of the Global Fashion Agenda. “We’ve been saying for so long that we need regulation, and suddenly it all came at the same time.”
There are overarching acronyms, sub acronyms and offshoot acronyms. There’s the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and its digital product passport (DPP). There’s the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the Green Claims Directive (GCD), to name just those making supply chain leaders in Europe lose the most sleep. In the US, efforts are more piecemeal, but equally confusing: there’s California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act (SB-707), the Garment Worker Protection Act (SB62), and the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (SB253), plus the yet to be passed Fashion Act (not to be mistaken for the New York Fashion Workers Act, which passed in December 2024).
All expect fashion to be more responsible for how it’s outfitting the world, and some are already coming into force. With them, come a host of new guidelines and laws that companies have to comply with, quickly.
ESPR, which outlined new measures this month and will see new requirements roll out this summer, is part of a package of measures supporting Europe’s transition to a more circular, sustainable economy. The latest measure, which dropped last week, will ban big companies from destroying unsold clothes and shoes as of July 19, 2026. The CSRD requires large EU and non-EU companies to publicly report ESG efforts, but the bureaucratic burden it brought when it took effect in 2024 was enough to prompt an agreement in December to simplify it. The provisional Omnibus agreement is currently awaiting the European Parliament’s endorsement, but once adopted, CSRD will apply to 80% fewer companies (only those with more than a thousand employees and a €450 million-plus net turnover) and push reporting that would have been due this year to 2028. Europe’s competitiveness is at stake if compliance becomes too burdensome, and in an Antwerp meeting last week, industry leaders called on the European Commission to continue supporting this kind of regulatory relief.
With the CSDDD, it’s about establishing due diligence to catch and stop adverse human rights and environmental impacts in supply chains, which now only applies to companies with 5,000 employees and a €1.5 billion net turnover. The GCD, which targets greenwashing by making companies back up their sustainability claims, “is the most important one, especially after the watering down of the [CSRD] reporting”, says Barbara Oswald, chief commercial officer at Swiss-based sustainability certification provider Bluesign. This directive, which Oswald says should take effect in September, is the one that’ll allow brands to know what sustainability data they can trust from suppliers, and help consumers believe in it.
Both the sustainability regulations and the language to describe them are changing “almost as fast as fashion”, Lehmann says. “On top of geopolitics, we also have this kind of volatility where you don’t even know where lawmakers are taking us.”
In the US, lawmakers seem to be going the way of deregulation. On Thursday, the Trump administration announced plans to toss out the long-standing federal assessment that climate change harms people and the environment, removing the government’s authority to curb the emissions accelerating global heating.
The rollback is “deeply alarming”, adds Lehmann. “Cheap, reliable renewable energy isn’t just climate policy — it is economic strategy. It drives job creation, attracts investment, and underpins future-proof industrial leadership,” he says. “Meanwhile, stepping back from climate safeguards risks ceding markets, innovation, and economic resilience to nations that see the clean energy transition as the next frontier of global competitiveness.”
Politics aside, the volatility — and at times the confusion — surrounding sustainability is tying things up in the supply chain, as brands grapple with what to do first, suppliers get stuck with the bill, and developing new business takes longer as both sides work out whether their relationship will be a compliant one.
The European Union’s wave of sustainable fashion legislation will have huge implications for suppliers, but compliance won’t come without a change in how the industry operates.
For brands to be compliant, they need data from their suppliers; for suppliers to be compliant, they have to put in the work — upskilling workers to use new data collection systems, installing both hardware and software that facilitates this, and sometimes operating multiple systems at once, before even considering the actual sustainability improvements needed. All of this comes at a cost. Add tariffs to the mix and things get even messier. “The pressure is on manufacturers to eat part of those tariffs, so you’ve got lower prices but more work,” says Matthijs Crietee, secretary general of the International Apparel Federation (IAF). “That’s a difficult equation.”
At Ereks-Blue Matters, a circular garment manufacturer in Istanbul that counts Fiorucci and Wrangler among clients, the new reporting requirements have been a boon and a bane. While they have “definitely improved conditions”, in terms of providing benchmarks that make year-on-year environmental improvements easier to see, head of strategy and innovation Romain Narcy says, they also require a significant increase in time and staff to manage data collection, as well as to get production going. “The onboarding process for clients now takes significantly longer, as comprehensive social and environmental audits must be completed and assessed before production can begin.”
The ESG regulations have seen brands asking Narcy for “comprehensive documentation”, including DPPs, Life Cycle Assessments (LCA), and Social Life Cycle Assessments, he says, and “with the exception of one brand that covers the cost of a single audit, our factory is currently absorbing the majority of these compliance costs”. The factory needs more support to pay for these ramped-up demands, Narcy continues, because, without it, brand-supplier relationships could become further strained at a time when partnership is what’s keeping things moving in an already plagued supply chain.
But beyond cost, there still isn’t enough harmonization where data collection is concerned. “If you’re a supplier, you have 20 clients and they’re not aligned enough in what they ask and how they ask it, and what format you should deliver it in. That just multiplies the work you have to do,” Crietee says. “This is really an industry challenge.”
Some brands have tried to get on the same page with data collection, aligning under The Fashion Pact’s European Accelerator. The initiative — signed in November by Chanel, Kering, Prada Group and Zegna Group, among others — is working to get luxury fashion to agree on a simplified reporting process for suppliers. “Trust, open discussions, and willingness to find a common ground are the key enablers of this initiative,” Edoardo Zegna, chief marketing and sustainability officer at Zegna Group, said at the time.
Cascale, Fair Wear and Zalando Group, among other retailers, are working on their own unified questionnaire, the Retailer Brand Due Diligence Questionnaire, as well as what they’re calling One Retail Hub, a platform built in partnership with TrusTrace that would facilitate seamless data exchange. The aim is to counter the “fragmented landscape of initiatives and systems” that has emerged in line with regulation, according to a statement from Zegna Group.
For now, any bottlenecks are a symptom of bureaucracy overtaking values in terms of what’s driving sustainability. Bluesign’s Oswald says brands need to get back to what’s really important, their core commitments.
The new ESG requirements don’t need to slow down the industry, she says. “The bottlenecks can happen when these rules move a little bit faster,” Oswald says. “But every brand that knows their supply chain and knows where the data is coming from and the material they use in their end product and where it’s used… they don’t have anything to fear.”
